FROM 2016-17 Maths and sci­ence will be taught ev­ery day, so­cial stud­ies and lan­guages on al­ter­nate days

NAVI MUM­BAI: The ed­u­ca­tion de­part­ment of the Navi Mum­bai Mu­nic­i­pal Cor­po­ra­tion (NMMC) is mulling dif­fer­ent op­tions to re­duce the weight of school­bags from aca­demic year 2016-17. As one of the mea­sures, the de­part­ment has planned to re-struc­ture the timetable of civic schools.

In July 2015, the state ed­u­ca­tion de­part­ment had is­sued a govern­ment res­o­lu­tion ( GR), which spec­i­fied the max­i­mum pre­scribed weight of a school­bag should not ex­ceed 10% of the child’s body weight.

In ac­cor­dance with the GR, the civic body will resched­ule the timetable of civic schools in such a way that the chil­dren have to carry the least num­ber of books ev­ery day.

“We have been mulling var­i­ous pro­pos­als to ef­fec­tively re­duce the weight of school­bags. We have de­cided that in­stead of hav­ing all the lec­tures ev­ery day, we will have al­ter­nate lec­tures of the sub­jects,” said Am­r­ish Pat­ni­gire, deputy mu­nic­i­pal com­mis­sioner of NMMC’s ed­u­ca­tion de­part­ment.

“Seven sub­jects are taught to stu­dents ev­ery day,” said Pat­ni­gire, adding, “We plan to re­duce this to four or five sub­jects a day.”

Pat­ni­gire said, “We will shuf­fle the so­cial stud­ies and lan­guage sub­jects on al­ter­nate days, but will teach Maths and Sci­ence ev­ery day as chil­dren re­quire more time to prac­tice and un­der­stand th­ese two sub­jects.”

Be­sides this, the de­part­ment has al­ready started im­ple­ment­ing dig­i­tal learn­ing in civic schools. Around 50 teach­ers were trained to use sim­ple dig­i­tal learn­ing meth­ods such as con­nect­ing smart­phones to a pro­jec­tor, among other au­dio­vi­sual medi­ums, to ex­plain var­i­ous con­cepts to stu­dents.

“Teach­ers f rom 20 civic schools have started us­ing th­ese meth­ods to teach some sub­jects. Ex­plain­ing con­cepts through di­a­grams and pre­sen­ta­tions makes learn­ing more in­ter­est­ing for stu­dents. Slowly, it will be ini­ti­ated in all the schools from this aca­demic year on­wards,” said the of­fi­cial.

An­other ini­tia­tive that the de­part­ment has taken is to pro­vide all civic schools with racks in class­rooms for chil­dren to keep their ex­tra books or ma­te­ri­als.

Of­fi­cials also plan to in­tro­duce tablets for stu­dents, but have been un­able to do so ow­ing to lack of funds. “A few or­gan­i­sa­tions have ex­pressed their in­ter­est in be­ing a part of this project. But it is still in the ini­tial stage,” said the of­fi­cial.